There was possibly another way though …
I walked to the small door at the end of the hallway that I’d never seen opened. It was likely nothing—just storage or a servants’ passage. Still, my feet carried me forward.
I hesitated as I reached it, my fingers closing around the simple bronze handle, expecting resistance as I pressed my palm to it. But it turned.
A soft click echoed into the quiet. The door cracked open and cool air kissed my cheeks. My breath caught. Not just because it was unlocked, but because the breath of wind on my face was from the outside. This was a direct exit from the palace.
Opening the door wider, I flinched as a thread of spider silk brushed across my cheek. Dust stirred at my feet, rising in a lazy spiral as if I’d disturbed a long-held silence. The hinges groaned softly, the sound swallowed by the thick hush of the space beyond.
My pulse thudded in my throat as I stared down the narrow passage, its stone walls cloaked in shadow. I reached to my right and pulled a torch from its sconce, the flame sputtering as if it resented being disturbed. Cobwebs clung to the corners, and the faint scent of damp stone and long neglect curled around me. Beyond the reach of the flame, there was nothing, just darkness and the distant sigh of night.
Slipping through the threshold, I let the door creak shut behind me.
I barely made it down the corridor before my knees dipped and I lurched forward, tripping over nothing … or maybe over everything I couldn’t leave behind.
Pulling myself together, I pushed off, sandals slapping stone as I flew down the steps. Another turn, another drop … and then I stopped short, reaching out and setting the torch into a bracket beside the archway.
Beyond it, the sky stretched wide and dark above me. The moon bathed everything in its eerie light. Beyond the palace walls, the sea burned crimson, molten and still. I dragged in gulps of air, each one rough but steadier than the last, the tight band around my chest loosening grain by grain. The world no longer spun at the edges, only throbbed, as though my panic had left bruises inside me.
Olive and cypress rushed up my nose, green and bitter. But it wasn’t the scent that stopped my heart.
It was the impossible.
A garden.
A real one.
Not the scraggly, dust-riddled plots the rest of Sparta pretended still grew, not the brittle herbs clinging to cracked stone near temple walls. This was lush. Alive. Menelaus’s garden … everyone had heard about it, whispered stories of flowers kept alive while children drank dust. He was the only one in Sparta who still had one, they said, fed by water better spent on mouths. Hearing about it was one thing. Seeing it, however, was something else entirely.
I stood frozen, surrounded by … roses.
Not the wilted sketches etched in ancient books, not the embroidered symbols stitched into temple cloth, but living things, blooming in defiance of the curse that the rest of Sparta was under. They spilled from the red soil in tangled clusters, thorned and wild, their petals the color of fresh wounds. I stood frozen, watching them sway in the still night air.
I reached out with a trembling finger, part of me expecting them to vanish beneath my fingers. It was soft though, impossibly soft, as though the curse on the rest of Sparta had simply forgotten it.
Stunned, I exhaled and moved closer.
Thorns brushed my finger, and before I could pull away, one bit into my skin, a quick, unforgiving sting. Hissing, I yanked my hand away, staring as blood welled bright against my fingertip and spilled in small drops down to the soil below.
Red on red. A secret offering … or maybe the price of such a place.
Something flashed to my left and I turned. Moonlight had caught on metal, glinting through a break in the hedgerow. I moved toward it, pushing past a curtain of overgrown roses, thorns scraping my skirts.
The path curved for a moment before opening up and revealing wide marble columns that ringed a flat expanse of packed, dark earth. I immediately recognized it for what it was: a sparring court.
Steel sliced the air. A blade spun, fast and gleaming, and then … Achilles.
Bare-chested, his skin gleamed with sweat, every taut line of him alive with motion. He spun, lunged, turned, his blade flashing with every strike.
I couldn’t look away.
I’d heard stories of him all through my teenage years. The Fates had been at his cradle, murmuring his doom like a lullaby. Gods had touched him, cursed him, maybe even loved him a little.
And now here he was, alone in the moonlight, fighting ghosts no one else could see.
He spun, his blade a ribbon of silver cutting through the night. I watched drops of sweat trace down his perfect abdomen. His hair was darkened from his exercise, and it clung to his neck and jaw, wild, as if it answered to no hand but his own. He lunged, turned, spun again, each movement brutal and beautiful.
For a moment I forgot to breathe.
